Ganneff's Little Blog

Thoughts of a small and very unimportant Debian Developer

Third day of DebConf8 now - and it has been a pretty nice time since I arrived. The local orga team is doing a marvelous job, making this whole conference a really nice experience for about every attendee.

Thanks to that we had a lot of time doing actual Debian work, which meant that we got a nice number of changes in dak either done or planned for the future, including a redesign of our database schema. Which is urgently needed if we want to follow some of the points we discussed. Like throwing away apt-ftparchive and generating the Packages files ourselve. Or various other enhancements.

So for dak, the changes are summarised into:

Adapt an old patch for process-new, so that NEW packages only adding new binary components are sorted higher during the processing.

Imported a patch from Joachim that adds an (effectively) anti-s390-buildd-maintainer option to our cruft-report full mode. Well, actually it lists a set of packages which are marked “not-for-us” on the buildd, but still have a (outdated) binary in unstable, effectively blocking updates of the packages going into testing. Ideally a buildd maintainer would report to the maintainer (through a bug or even just a mail) when he sets not-for-us (which is a short-term-solution, long-term P-a-s should be used), but that doesn’t seem to happen.

Replaced a 128 line NIH syndrom perl script with one of those new-fangled sarge-and-later options in rsync :)

Fixed bugs in code-pathes that are nearly never used - but which we managed to trigger twice while fixing a gpl violation (missing source) in our archive.

Merged a patch that changes NEW handling of packages for stable/oldstable.

Added signing of the buildd incoming.debian.org directory. Still need to announce this on d-d-a, but buildd maintainers should now be able to enable the gpg verification.

Automate the i18n package description translation import so we finally get rid of the “one-time-manual-sync-back-in-2006” outdated translations. And have an automated but secure way to get updates.

Started the layout of the new projectb.

But we did not only do work on dak, we also did some work for the conference. In the days down here we (re)wrote the Pentabarf entrance controller, enabling our frontdesk to check people in, keeping track of various details they need to know about them. We wrote entirely new controllers for Pentabarf, one of it being the part that manages this years Assassins game. Other orga team members (hello triple des :) ) wrote a video and a volunteer controller. I guess after DebConf we will have some fun time to merge our changes back to upstream.

Travel in .ar

Oh well, as some people know, I stay in Argentina for about 10 days more after DebConf is over (my flight back goes on 27. August, in the evening). Up to now I haven’t decided - or even started planning - what I do here. I should probably look at that soon.